Immigration Blog

The so-called "Gang of Eight" senators have released their plan for "comprehensive immigration reform" — The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. A comprehensive immigration bill, if enacted, would constitute, for better or worse, the most fundamental change to American immigration law since the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (the Hart-Celler Act). Read more...

Three of the leading congressional advocates of the comprehensive reform legislation that will be debated in the Senate and House over the next several months made solemn pledges this week about what the bill would offer. If what Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) promised matches up with what the bill actually provides, it would represent an historic compromise to resolve our long-simmering immigration policy crisis. It will meet a key test. It will be hard-headed, but not hard-hearted. Read more...

The key political problem amnesty advocates face is a trust gap. The public, rightly, doesn't believe promises from the political class that they're newly committed to enforcing immigration laws after decades of non-enforcement.

One key provision of the Schumer/Rubio immigration bill tells you all you need to know about its phoniness. It requires the development within 10 years of a check-in/check-out system for foreign visitors. That's important because nearly half the illegal population came here legally but never left. Only if we record who leaves can we know who's still here illegally. Read more...

The Gang of Eight in the U.S. Senate has advocated 10-year wait for a green card for most of those in the proposed amnesty followed by a three-year period before naturalization could begin.

How should we think about that?

My position is that any broad-brush amnesty is a bad idea because it would encourage more illegal immigration in the future. That certainly was the result of the IRCA legalization of the 1980s. Read more...

When observing the folks who make up our political class, I'm often of the opinion that, somehow, reality is always just slightly distorted around them — as if they are in another, alternate universe altogether and they only seem to share space and time with us, but not in any meaningful way. Read more...

The breathtaking casualness of the Gang of Eight — and the media — as they deal with the exploding population of the United States was demonstrated in this morning's New York Times with this off-hand remark:

The legislation also aims to eliminate the backlog of 4.7 million immigrants who have applied to come here legally and have been languishing waiting for green cards.

These numbers are drawn from a recent CIS Backgrounder, "Immigration and the American Worker: A Review of the Academic Literature", by Harvard Professor George Borjas, who is generally recognized to be the nation's leading immigration economist. They show only the non-fiscal economic impacts of international migration. Were tax and welfare balances to be shown, since immigrants are, on average, a low-income population, the picture would be even more dramatic. Read more...

If the government's experts tell us that we are producing far more high-tech grads than the industry needs (as they do), why are the politicians thinking about importing even larger cohorts of alien tech workers? Are the pols, maybe, paying more attention to the lobbyists than to the facts? Read more...

Every day, 30,000 authorized federal, state, and local government users query US-VISIT's data in order to accurately identify people and determine whether they pose a risk to the United States. US-VISIT supplies the technology for collecting and storing biometric data, provides analysis of the data to decision-makers, and ensures the integrity of the data.

By using biometrics, US-VISIT is helping to prevent the use of fraudulent documents, protect visitors from identity theft, and stop thousands of criminals and immigration violators from entering the country.

Dictionary.com defines the interesting German word schadenfreude as "satisfaction or pleasure at someone else's misfortune". Every language should have such a word, although I suspect many don't because few of us admit to such feelings — they're among life's guilty little pleasures. Read more...

Lane Beattie, president and CEO of the powerful Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce, threatened Republican Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee with recall if they don't bow to the Chamber's demands for immediate amnesty for illegal aliens and their employers.

Beattie characterized the senators' requests for more time to evaluate and debate the overhaul of the nation's immigration system as "absolutely ridiculous to me". Then he played the recall card: "Good night. Maybe it's time to recall and get some people who understand what we need in business because in businesses we need some immigration changes. (Click here to listen to Beattie.) Read more...

IRCA's Gang of Three. Currently there are Gangs of Eight in both the Senate and the House trying to resolve the inevitable immigration policy conflicts by quiet negotiation among these self-selected, bipartisan groupings. Too many commentators regard these (conspiratorial?) gatherings as signs of progress. I beg to differ. Read more...

We still don't have an amnesty bill to examine — maybe today, maybe next week, like a contractor telling you when he'll be done remodeling the bathroom. But based on Katrina Trinko's post over at National Review Online and the New York Timesstory, a few thoughts: Read more...

The year's supply of H-1B visas for inexpensive high-tech workers was exhausted the first week that the window was opened — to no one's surprise. Every year the visas become available to employers on April 1 — 65,000 in the general category and 20,000 in the advanced-degree-in-the-U.S. category.

Bargain-hunting employers, particularly the Indian body shops (i.e. placement agencies), poured in their applications, hoping to obtain nearly indentured college graduates on the cheap, most of whom will be assigned to routine technological jobs. Read more...

If, as they say, politics makes for strange bedfellows, then immigration politics in today's America makes for absolutely bizarre bedfellows.

Business and agriculture rarely have anything useful to say about unionization and the labor movement. Conversely, labor leaders routinely disparage employers, whether in business or agriculture, for their views on wages, benefits, and employee working conditions. And religious leaders frequently shun involvement in such earthly matters, preferring instead to focus on the moral health of their flock and the nation as a whole. Read more...

There are three different ways that an alien can buy his or her way into legal status; each pathway has a different price, sometimes involving more than just money; and each pathway has its own advantages and disadvantages. Here is a summary, more or less in the style of Consumer Reports, for the three routes to buy legal status: Read more...

The Saturday edition of Mexico City's Reforma newspaper published a bitter description of what its author sees as a long chain of exploitation suffered by Central American migrants on their journey to the United States. Read more...

One of the toughest challenges for the media is to put a personal face on a story. They always want to have a subject to show how an issue affects an individual. This can be very tough for a national issue like H-1B visas. Over the years I have frequently received requests from reporters like "Do you know an American living in Peoria who has been replaced by an H-1B worker within the past three months?" This was tough even when I was working as a programmer. I saw Americans being replaced by H-1B workers first hand, but they were always in New Jersey. Read more...

What I most enjoy about my work here at CIS is the opportunity to do to the sort of research I did in the good old days when I was an investigative reporter and had weeks or months to dig into a story.

This week I got two fascinating views of the ongoing debate over guestworkers. One came from the right, via C-Span's website. The other came from the left, via Audible.com. Read more...

The Supreme Court has held that deportation is not punishment, but rather an administrative procedure whereby an illegal alien is returned to his homeland. The alien has not been deprived of life, liberty, or property, so many constitutional protections do not apply.

Most important to the discussion is the fact that most detainees facing deportation are dealing with administrative charges in a civil process, rather than criminal. Consequently they do not have a constitutional right to an attorney; such protections only apply to criminal law. Read more...

In addition, the Utah Compact was signed by three former Utah governors, a retired U.S. Senator, the state's former Attorney General, and a who's who of Utah business, civic, and religious leaders. Read more...

There is an interesting article by Jeffrey Toobin in the April 1, 2013, edition of The New Yorker magazine. Entitled "Wedding Bells", it is a legal analysis of the two gay rights cases on which the Supreme Court recently held oral argument, and which it will be deciding this term. Read more...

The Sunlight Foundation reports that $1.5 billion went to immigration lobbying from 2007 through 2012. The money was spent by 678 organizations in 170 sectors on 987 proposed bills.

Analyzing nearly 1,000 bills is no small task, even for those devoted exclusively to the immigration issue. Proposed immigration legislation can get complicated, with attempts to reform the entire system nearing 1,000 pages. Since immigration affects practically every aspect of American life and Congress keeps trying to change the existing law, you can see why the public might want to invest substantial amounts to influence what is being decided. Read more...

In a victory for those who want to further blur the line between legal and illegal, the Associated Press has announced its decision to stop using the term "illegal immigrant" in its articles. Instead, the new "acceptable variations" include "living in or entering a country illegally" or "without legal permission". Journalists make it a rule to be concise and not wordy. But such standards are thrown out the window when it comes to the illegal immigration issue, it seems. Read more...

Last year, nearly 700,000 people were issued temporary visas to work in the United States, either for several years or indefinitely. About two-thirds are in categories requiring skills and/or education and one-third were given visas to work in unskilled jobs. Over the weekend, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced that the AFL-CIO and Chamber of Commerce had agreed on a proposal to increase the number of unskilled guestworker visas above and beyond the number already being issued, and despite lingering high unemployment rates for U.S. workers affected by these visa programs.

My immediate reaction in a blog about the EB-5 scandal in Chicago, involving investments of $145 million last month was off the mark.

Being all too accustomed to writing about fraudulent practices by promoters of this program, I was a bit blase about the news and emphasized the fact that the Securities and Exchange Commission had taken the lead in breaking this case, not USCIS. The court filings dealt with getting money under false pretenses, not with the multiple violations of the immigration law and regulations that also had occurred.

What I did not realize at the time was that this really was a very big deal, nationally and internationally. Read more...

With the GOP establishment rushing off to embrace amnesty, which Republican leaders fancy will win them party allegiance from Latino voters, they stand in danger of returning their party to a mere echo of the Democratic Party. The big question becomes whether the GOP will go the whole distance on other issues. Read more...

I've got nothing good to say about Don Young, the Republican congressman from Alaska who last week stumbled into the headlines with his reference to "wetbacks" who picked tomatoes at the Young farm in California many years ago.

Young's comment shows that he is as thoughtless now as he was reckless when he plundered the federal treasury for pork-laden projects known as earmarks. He was responsible for the most infamous earmark of them all: Alaska's Bridge to Nowhere. Read more...

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization founded in 1985.
It is the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic,
fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States.